100 Days of Bloody Dairy

An inquisitive swan hiding inside a banana, the liquefied remains of a melting cat being lapped up by another cat, and an endless parade of refrigerator-dwelling penguins – these are just some of the surreal happenings in Bloody Dairy, a project conceived by animator and motion graphics designer Min Liu. Inspired by #The100DaysProject, an initiative that aimed to galvanize a person’s creativity by having them perform an action for 100 consecutive days, the Taiwanese artist challenged herself to publish a unique animation every single day.

“When I started this, I just wanted to do something fun and push my sanity,” Liu recalls. And so, with a typo while registering her Instagram account, Bloody Dairy was born. The resulting work of the project – which is entirely dual-chromatic, combining red, black, and her adept useage of negative space – was difficult as expected. “I had to finish and upload an animation before 12 am every day, which left me no time to overthink it,” she says. “With a limited time frame and compositional limits – since Instagram only supported square videos at the time – it was interesting to see what I can create inside that little box.” During those 100 days, the inspiration for her delightfully absurd animations ranged from of random musings of everyday life to observations of her two cats. “Cats are aliens,” she remarked. “Just look at them.”

As for other sources of inspiration, Liu revealed that one of her favorite artists is Junji Ito, a Japanese manga artist who’s notorious for his disturbing horror stories. Taking this into consideration, it’s not surprising to, at times, see her work give nod to the macabre. From a character unzipping her flesh to reveal spines and rib bones to a beheaded female holding her own soon-to-explode floating head tied to a string – Liu’s work doesn’t quite traverse into the unsettling like Ito but is tastefully sprinkled with her signature style of dark humor.

Not immediately obvious in Bloody Dairy, but for Liu’s past and ongoing collaborations, it’s evident that music also plays a prominent role in her creative process. She animated the award-winning music video for “Wide Awake,” a 2016 track by Brooklyn-based electronic-rock band A Love Like Pi; designed promo visuals for multiple Taiwanese bands as part of Taiwanese Wave, a New York music festival dedicated towards up-and-coming Taiwanese musicians; and is currently working on Italian rapper Mecna’s new music video.

At the end of the 100-day long project, she compiled all of the GIFs from Bloody Dairy into a three-minute long short film under the same name, which went on to win numerous awards from various film and animation festivals. “I’m still on the path to finding my own style, but I think I’m at a good place now,” Liu humbly says. “I’m still quite new in this field but I’ve learned a lot from all the people who I’ve worked with.”

From now through February 5th, works by Min Liu and other various Taiwanese artists will be on display at the Visual Taipeiexhibition as part of Graphic Design Festival Paris; the exhibition is an extension of the successful showcase that debuted last year at World Design Capital Taipei. Later this year, she also has plans of releasing a sticker pack for the LINE messaging app. “Motion graphics has been booming these last few years,” Liu says excitedly. “I can’t wait to see how the industry progresses in the future.”